"Laura?"
Her first thought was that she hurt. A lot.
"Laura."
Her second thought she said out loud. "Bill?"
"Hey."
Laura opened her eyes to find Admiral Adama smiling down at her, and felt the corners of her mouth twitch into an instinctive smile of her own.
"How are you feeling?" the admiral asked.
"Hurt," she admitted.
Bill nodded. "I was kinda hoping you were still out. You've dislocated your shoulder; I'm going to have to pop it back in."
Laura closed her eyes and breathed out. "Okay."
A wave of pain rushed through her left arm as Bill gently lifted it, then gripped it harder. "This is gonna hurt," he warned.
"Just do it," Laura mumbled.
Bill pulled, and twisted, and—oh, pain!
It seared through her shoulder like fire and she was pretty sure that she screamed... and then it subsided to a dull throbbing and Bill was looking at her apologetically.
"Thanks," she squeaked, and he smiled again.
"You should find something to strap that up with as soon as possible," he said.
"Later," she said dismissively, reaching for him with her other arm so he could help her sit up. "What's happening?" she asked, taking in her surroundings.
"Well," Bill said, seating himself in a more comfortable position on the floor once Laura was upright, "The good news is that the gravity generator is working again. It's only at half power, but with the asteroid's own gravity it's almost normal... Though you may want to avoid jumping up and down."
"And the bad news?" Laura asked, demanding the inevitable.
Bill sighed. "The pilot's dead. Lee was in the cockpit with him trying to help out and has a concussion and some cracked ribs. Communications are down and Dee isn't sure she can get them working again, and the propulsion system is smashed up pretty bad. We've got some food and drink, but there's no telling if it'll last until we get back in the air."
"If we ever do."
Bill nodded. "That's about the size of it."
"Right." Laura swallowed, letting the gears click into place in her mind as she went into presidential mode. "How many people do we have?"
"There were ten including the pilot."
"So that's nine now. Has anybody worked out exactly how long the food will last?"
"No. Melissa, the stewardess, says there's more in the hold than what we have here in the cabin." Bill indicated the young woman who had been hovering anxiously around the guests when the shuttle had been launched, probably wondering exactly what she was supposed to do on such a short flight. She was now looking rather dazed sitting on the floor holding a makeshift bandage to a cut on her cheek. The one member of the press who had been permitted to travel with them was filming a rather heated discussion between the two Quorum members present, which Tory seemed to be trying to mediate. Lieutenant Dualla was tending to a wound on Apollo's leg with something resembling tenderness.
Laura took this all in, nodding to herself as she did so. "Help me up," she told Bill.
The Admiral obliged, and Laura got shakily to her feet. Still hanging onto his arm for support, she steered them towards the Quorum members.
"Mr. Gillan, Madam Vardon," she greeted them. "What's the trouble here?"
Gillan looked at her incredulously. His gray hair was in disarray and he looked distinctly shaken. "What's the trouble? We've crashed, that's the trouble! In the middle of a Cylon attack!"
"He thinks the repairs on the propulsion system should take priority over communication," Vardon put in. "But if we repair communications first Galactica can launch a rescue mission." She looked at Gillan pointedly.
"Admiral, what do you think?" Laura asked, appealing to authority.
Bill clenched his jaw, thinking. "We don't have a proper damage assessment of either system yet, so we don't even know if they can be repaired. In any case, I'm putting Lieutenant Dualla in charge of dealing with communications and Major Adama of fixing the propulsion. Neither of them are experts on this particular ship's systems, so they're gonna have to play it by ear."
Gillan still looked incredulous. "That's it? That's what you're going to do?"
"It's all we can do, Mr. Gillan," Bill replied calmly. "Our best. In the meantime, if you'd like to help us with assessing the food situation and figuring out a rationing system, that would be most helpful." He nodded at the two Quorum members. "Mr. Gillan, Madam Vardon, if you'll excuse me, I'll speak to my officers and make sure repairs get underway." Looking at Laura, he put a hand over hers on his arm in question. She nodded a response, letting go of him and standing without support as he walked away.
"I'll see if I can find out how much water we have," Tory said.
"Thank you, Tory." Laura turned to address the three remaining members of the small group. "I suggest we do as the Admiral says and go down to the hold to see how much food we have." Laura left the way aft to the hatch leading below without leaving the others time for debate. "Could you open this, please?" she asked the reporter, which had the desired effect of him turning the camera off and tightening its strap around his shoulder in order to pull the hatch open with both hands. Laura accepted his hand in support when the ladder below was revealed. She tried to use her left arm, but her shoulder protested painfully so she had to descend one-handedly.
The hold of this ship was not at all like that of Colonial One – which was unsurprising really, as Colonial One's hold was currently home to around seventy people. This place was obviously, though, home to somebody, and Laura felt a momentary pang of guilt at having rooted whoever it was out just to facilitate what would have been a ten-minute journey. A pile of shabby mattresses was stacked up against the hull at the far end, next to which stood a large crate filled with clothes and topped with books and knick-knacks.
What interested Laura currently, though, was the stack of smaller crates closer to the ladder the other members of her little foraging party were now climbing down. Two yellow colored ones on top were open, and Laura peered inside one of them to find containers of nuts, sausages, pre-sliced cheese and other food she had seen on the buffet table, as well as a small box of cocktail sticks.
The other open crate proved to be full of champagne.
"Ye gods, how much did they expect us to drink?" she murmured – then immediately regretted the remark when the reporter switched his camera back on to get a shot of it.
Fleet's Alcohol Wasted On Dignitaries, Laura thought wryly.
"Alright," she said. "We need to open each of these crates and find out what we've got to work with. You," she said, turning to the reporter, "Use your camera to catalogue it." She waited for him to nod before reaching for the first unopened crate.
The three government officials lent themselves to the task with varied enthusiasm. Mr. Gillan, whom Laura had long ago pegged as tending rather to the paranoid and hypochondriac in addition to being dull, squeaked quite amusingly when he opened a crate to find a hypodermic needle staring him in the face. Further investigation by Madam Vardon, who had once been a paramedic, revealed the crate to contain a collection of rudimentary medical supplies.
Well. That was a small victory, at least.
"Madam President."
Laura looked up to see Tory climbing down the ladder.
"There's a water tank behind the bathroom, capacity five hundred gallons, but probably only a hundred in there."
Laura made some calculations in her head. "That's water for about five days," she said. "Ten, maybe, if we don't use it other than to drink. It sounds like a lot, but we still don't know how long repairs will take." And since when had she known the figures for minimum water requirement off the top of her head, anyway, Laura wondered... "Alright. You help out here; I'll talk to the Admiral."
"Yes ma'am." Tory nodded and turned to help with the crates.
Laura climbed back up into the cabin. When she had packed all those skirts back on Caprica – Gods, over two years ago now – she hadn't anticipated having to climb quite so many ladders...
She found Bill talking to the stewardess, who was now on her feet looking slightly less ruffled. He turned when he saw her.
"Hey," he said. "How are things looking down there?"
"We have food for a couple of days at least, and enough alcohol to keep us drunk for about a week," she said, letting the tilt of her eyebrows acknowledge the stupidity of the situation. "We also found some medical supplies."
Bill nodded. "That's good. If you'd like I'll strap your arm for you while we wait for an estimate on repairs."
Laura smiled gratefully. "That's very kind of you Bill; thank you."
"I'll find some bandages," he said, heading for the ladder.
Finding herself alone with the stewardess, Laura turned to speak to her. "Melissa, isn't it?" she said kindly.
The stewardess nodded, swallowing.
"You don't have any kind of technical expertise on this ship, by any chance?" Laura asked; there was no harm in it, after all.
Melissa swallowed again before speaking. "I… I'm training to be a pilot, Madam President."
"Really…"
At last, some real luck…
Laura looked around the cabin, currently only inhabited by Dualla working on the passenger communications terminal. "Come with me," she said to the stewardess, striding toward the door to the cockpit. She knocked before pushing it open.
"Madam President," Lee Adama said, looking up from a mess of wires pulled free from a panel in the wall.
"Major Apollo," she acknowledged, "How's it going?"
"I'm… really not sure," he admitted. "It's gonna take me a while to figure out how all this works, let alone what's wrong with it."
Laura smiled. "Major Adama, may I present Melissa, who is training to fly this very vessel."
The relief in his face was evident. "Melissa, you have no idea how glad I am to meet you. You think you can help me figure out how to fix this thing?"
"I'll do my very best," Melissa promised, promptly removing her stewardess' hat and gloves and getting on her knees to examine the open panel.
"Alright." He sighed, giving Laura a quick nod of thanks as he got to his feet. "I'll go check on Dee."
Laura followed him back out, then stood near the ladder trying to appear as if she couldn't hear the whispered argument between Apollo and his wife. She was insisting that she didn't need his help, though even Laura could see that she clearly did – the panel she was struggling to lift off the wall was obviously heavy enough to cause serious damage if it fell on her.
"Here we go," said Bill's voice behind her, and Laura started, spinning to face him.
Bill grinned. "Come on."
He walked past her to the captain's cabin, pointedly ignoring his officers' bickering as he held the door open for Laura. She slipped inside and looked around as he closed it.
It was less a room than it was a box, she thought. The bed took up most of it – it was a real bed, albeit cheaply made – and the floorspace was further compromised by a narrow desk and simple metal chair. The desk was empty save a few sparse items of stationary, though Laura couldn't tell if this was because the pilot had tidied it in anticipation of her visit or because it was all he owned. The only storage space seemed to be a rail on the wall from which a clean uniform was hanging, a small shelf above the bed, which held four or five books, and a large drawer under it. The edge of some piece of clothing was poking out from the top of the drawer, suggesting the pilot had shoved things in there in a hurry.
Laura spared a moment to mourn the loss of yet another human being, then sat down on the bed and shrugged carefully out of her suit jacket. Bill walked the two or three steps to the far side of the cabin and sat next to her, laying his foraged medical supplies down on the desk.
She lifted her hands to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, then hissed quietly when pain shot through her left arm again. One-handed unbuttoning it was, then…
One-handed unbuttoning, it turned out, was a lot more difficult than one-handed ladder climbing. Laura looked up to find Bill smirking at her frustration.
She raised an eyebrow. "You could help, you know," she said pointedly.
"I didn't want to be presumptuous," he replied, reaching out to work the buttons swiftly now that he had permission.
Amused, Laura fixed him with a look. "Bill. We're all adults here."
A grin played at Bill's lips. "Speak for yourself. Do you know how long it's been since I've taken off a woman's blouse?"
"Hmm," she said. "Do I want to?"
"Suffice to say," he continued, "It's been long enough for me to be more appreciative of this than I perhaps should be." He slipped the unfastened blouse over her shoulders, his fingers lingering on her skin for longer than was strictly necessary, Laura was sure.
Bill ducked his head in apology. Laura smirked, and he smiled for a second before reaching for a bandage and getting back to business. When he looked at her again he seemed uncomfortable.
He cleared his throat. "If I'm gonna do this effectively you're going to have to take off your bra."
…Ah. That would explain it. "Okay," she said, trying for his sake not to let her private shiver of… apprehension? Titillation? …Show in her face or voice. She reached up behind her back with her good hand to unhook her bra, cursing herself as she felt her fingers shake. Why was she nervous? It was only Bill…
No, she corrected herself. It was the fact that it was Bill that was making her nervous. Bill and the whatever-it-was that hung like a permanent fixture between them, somehow simultaneously driving them both apart and ever closer together.
And Bill could feel it, too. Keeping his eyes firmly on the bandage and off the parts of her anatomy not usually on display, he instructed her to lift her good arm so he could pass the bandage underneath it. "This will probably hurt," he warned as he started to bind the top part of her other arm to her side.
"I'm sure I'll survive," Laura replied. She had meant it to sound light-hearted, but the effect was rather ruined when she clenched her teeth against the pain.
"Good to know."
Bill worked swiftly but gently as an uncomfortable silence descended in the tiny cabin. Gods, Laura thought, they hadn't endured quite such a silence since… actually, she couldn't even remember when. And it was all down to the whatever-it-was, she knew that much.
Usually she tried not to contemplate the whatever-it-was… the 'fixture'… all too deeply, which was mostly because she knew neither she nor Bill could or would act on it. But there was some kind of deep-seated attraction between them which only seemed to deepen farther with time. She had tried, on occasion, to tell herself it wasn't sexual; it was just two kindred spirits naturally gravitating toward one another, seeking comfort and understanding from the only other person who, in this new world of theirs, could possibly give it. However, the way she was reacting to his touch, and had reacted to the dozens of other innocent touches before it, was making this argument difficult to sustain.
Damn her for falling for the one she shouldn't have. Again.
"Okay," Bill's voice said, breaking her out of her reverie. He cleared his throat again and she smiled, pretending she hadn't been thinking about him, and he helped her with her bra without her having to ask. She pulled the straps over her arms and he pushed her hair aside to fasten it behind her back, and ha! – his fingers were shaking too…
Although, Laura reflected, it would all be some much easier if she knew her feelings weren't reciprocated…
The silence grew less uncomfortable the more clothes Laura had back on, a fact she could tell was lost on neither of them. Finally, when they were both standing and Bill had gathered what was left of the medical supplies, she felt the invisible barrier between them had strengthened again enough for her to touch his arm and smile and say thank you.
Bill smiled and nodded in return, then he opened the door and the President and the Admiral stepped back out into the main cabin.
Lee Adama accosted them almost immediately, asking in a low voice to speak with them urgently.
"Go ahead, Major, what is it?" Bill prompted.
His son looked down and swallowed before looking up again. "I was working on the communications panel and I found…" he trailed off, looking at Laura, and obviously decided to skip the technical details. He cleared his throat, reminding Laura for a split second all too much of his father, and continued, "Somebody sent a signal from it at a non-Colonial frequency right before the Cylons attacked. They knew exactly when to strike, right when both of you were on the shuttle." He paused again, as if what he was about to say required extra strength to utter. "Somebody onboard is either a collaborator or a Cylon."